Geometric Accuracy of PhaseOne PAS Pana

Abstract. Due to the currently limited size of CMOS-sensors and the demand for larger capacity imaging systems, camera systems are being used instead of single cameras. Beside smaller systems, PhaseOne produces now the PAS Pana system with a combination of 5 RGB cameras and 2 near infrared (NIR) cameras, each with 14204 × 10652 pixels (Figures 1, 2 and 3). This system captures fused images at 48800 × 12400 pixels in RGB NIR (red line in Figure 1). With the pixel size of 3.76 μm, a fused image has a size of 183.5 mm * 46.6 mm. Through thermal control, the geometry of each individual sub-camera can be almost completely guaranteed. However, this is not possible for such a large camera system, requiring a stitching of the sub-images by adjustment. The overlapping two infrared camera images cover the whole range of the 5 RGB sub-cameras. For this reason, the joint NIR images are used as reference for fusing the RGB sub-cameras. The geometric quality of the fused images is analysed with a block adjustment and it corresponds to the image accuracy of the sub-cameras.